Case study: The Historic Media Collection at Seattle Art Museum

The Historic Media Collection in the Seattle Art Museum’s Research Libraries & Archives is a unique collection of exclusively audiovisual materials that tell the history of the institution from its founding in 1933 up to 2019. With approximately 3,000 unique items on physical legacy formats of film, video and audio, establishing the collection and making it available to museum staff and researchers has been a long and ongoing journey. With the recent award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the digitisation, preservation and access to these materials has been prioritised. This paper provides a brief history of the collection along with a more in-depth look at the challenges and considerations in selecting a digital asset management system appropriate for the collection.